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The impact of the 2012 tuition fee changes on student flows across the UK’s internal borders

About 7% of full-time undergraduate students domiciled in the UK move to another home country of the UK to study. This proportion varies widely across the four home countries, from less than one in twenty English-domiciled students to around one in three from Wales and NorthernIreland. This cross-border movement offers potential educational benefits both to the students who move and to the institutions and fellow-students where they study. The interests of social justice require that opportunities for cross-border study be made available to all categories of students; the benefits to the receiving institutions and their students should similarly be available to all types of institutions, and these benefits are likely to be greater if they derive from a broad cross-section of students from the sending countries. Neither social justice nor the potential benefits of cross-border study, therefore, are likely to be realised if this is restricted to students from the most favourable social and educational backgrounds and to higher status institutions.

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